He joined Petrie at Kafr Ammar, fifty miles up the Nile from Cairo, in January 1912. Though he had dreamed of Egypt as a boy, he found the Professor’s style too ordered and systematic for his taste, and disliked the work, which consisted mainly of disinterring heat-mummified bodies. Petrie, whom Lawrence had met briefly as a schoolboy at the Ashmolean, was the most distinguished British archaeologist of his day. No patrician Oxford sophisticate of the Hogarth school, he was a self-trained excavator who had begun as a humble surveyor without any systematic education, and had used his great gifts to transform the practice of Egyptology. Before Petrie, Egyptologists had been little more than glorified treasure-hunters, obsessed with uncovering temples and carrying off vast statues for museums. Petrie had been the first to turn his attention to the despised minutiae of archaeology: the scribble on a potsherd, the fragment of an amulet, the remains of a ring. His methods of dating included the use of stylistic degeneration, which later became standard practice. At close quarters Lawrence found Petrie monumental ‘like a cathedral’, and he was amused when, after he had turned up on the site in a blazer and shorts, the Professor told him bluntly: ‘They don’t play cricket here.’ Lawrence, who was wearing the same dress he had worn at Carchemish, realized that shorts were considered infra digin Egypt, though the reference to cricket made him chuckle: ‘I expect he meant football,’ he later wrote. 2He felt a great sense of admiration for Petrie, but thought him dogmatic and opinionated. He also developed a strong distaste for the Egyptians, who, unlike the Arabs of Jarablus, would not play the colonial game of reassuring the Englishman that they were not diminished by his power. Lawrence found them ugly, dirty, dull and gloomy and ‘without the vigour’ of the Jarablus men. He could not talk to them with the same ‘delicious free intimacy’, 3for either they were surly, reminding him of his status, or else they ‘took liberties’, ignoring it. Neither of these styles was acceptable to Lawrence, for the Arab was supposed to treat the Englishman with a rough and ready frankness which gave the illusion of equality, without overstepping the mark into disrespect. In Egypt the gulf between the powerful and the powerless was clear to see: in Syria it was comfortably disguised. These prejudices, and the ache to be back with his friends at Carchemish, did nothing to stymie his energy, and Petrie was impressed enough to offer him a salary of Ј700 to supervise a dig at Bahrein or somewhere else in the Persian Gulf. Lawrence was tempted, but the call of Syria proved too strong, and by the end of February he was back at Carchemish.
Woolley was tied up in Egypt till March, and Lawrence had orders to proceed with the building of an Expedition House as a permanent base. As soon as he reached Jarablus, he recruited twenty-two men and started on the foundations, but the work was halted by the Corporal commanding the Turkish guard which had been posted to the site since Lawrence’s last visit. The Corporal inquired politely if he had permission to build a house. Lawrence answered that his sponsors had been given permission and that the local Governor was perfectly aware of it. ‘Quite so,’ said the Corporal, ‘but that Governor is gone.’ 4There was no alternative but to suspend work while the Corporal wired Istanbul for permission, and a fortnight later Lawrence was still waiting for an answer. He travelled to Aleppo to meet Woolley, who arrived on 10 March expecting to find the house ready. He was irate when he discovered that work had not even begun, and whipped off a cable to Kenyon in London, demanding action. There was worse news to follow, however. When Lawrence and Woolley turned up at the site a few days later, and began enrolling workmen, they were told by the same Corporal that work was prohibited. Woolley dispatched a curt letter to the Governor asking him to curb the Corporal’s interference, and, confident that he would receive a prompt reply, proceeded to recruit 120 men. The Governor did not even deign to answer Woolley in person. Shortly, the Corporal arrived with a letter stating that the Governor did not know who Woolley was, and that work could under no circumstances commence. ‘This was a nasty shock,’ Woolley wrote; ‘… to put off the diggings now meant not only a waste of time, but would destroy the men’s confidence and respect – an important thing in a country none too civilised.’ 5
Woolley and Lawrence conferred and decided they must confront the Governor, and on 17 March they set off by horse for Birejik, twenty-five miles to the north. They crossed the Euphrates by ferry, and, leaving their mounts at the khan,marched briskly up the main street to the government serail,standing in the shadows of a twelfth-century castle. Woolley sent in his card to the Governor’s office. There was no reply, and after a decent interval, he sent in his card again. Minutes ticked past, and no response came. This was intolerable treatment for respectable British subjects, Woolley felt, and, bursting with righteous indignation, he and Lawrence forced their way into the Governor’s office and sat down unceremoniously in front of his desk. As decorously as possible, Woolley inquired why work on the site had been prohibited. The Governor, a corpulent, sly-looking old man with a goatee beard, replied that the firmangranting permission to excavate at the site was made out to a Mr D. G. Hogarth, and, since neither of the gentlemen in his presence appeared to bear that name, they could not be permitted to start work. Woolley protested that he had letters from Hogarth and the British Museum, but these letters were in English and the Governor waved them aside. He mightbe able to permit work to begin, he said, if the Englishmen were prepared to pay the salary of an unofficial commissaire. Both Woolley and Lawrence then realized that he was fishing for a large bribe. Just what happened next is uncertain. Woolley claimed that he leapt up, drew his pistol, held it to the Turk’s head, and threatened to shoot him there and then. It seems more likely, though, that he merely told him that work would proceed whether he liked it or not, upon which the Governor said he would send troops to prevent it.
‘I only hope that you will come at the head of your soldiers,’ Woolley said. ‘Then I shall have the pleasure of shooting you first!’ 6
‘So,’ said the Turk. ‘You would declare war on the Ottoman Empire!’
‘Not on the Ottoman Empire,’ Woolley replied coolly. ‘Only on the Governor of Birejik.’ 7
The Governor realized that his bluff had been called and caved in, declaring that he saw no reason why they could not start the following day, after all. This gunboat diplomacy had a great impact on Lawrence, for all his scorn of ‘ruling-race fantasies’, and he began to copy his new Director’s abrasive manner, just as he had tried to emulate Hogarth’s smoothness: ‘Woolley is really a most excellent person,’ he wrote to Edward Leeds. ‘You should have heard him last Sunday, regretting to the Governor of the Province that he was forced to shoot all soldiers who tried to interrupt our work at Carchemish and his sorrow that the first victim would have to be the little [Corporal].’ 8
They returned triumphantly to Carchemish, where their tiny army of workmen had manned the diggings with rifles and pistols to repel the Turks. On seeing the Englishmen riding backjaunty and unharmed, the Arabs cheered enthusiastically and let rip with salvoes of shots. Haj Wahid – whom Woolley had left in charge – put ten rounds from Lawrence’s own Mauser through the roof of his tent in glee. The racket drew a troop of German engineers, who rushed down to see what they thought was a battle, only to collide with a cavalcade of horsemen escorting the Governor in person. He had come only to deliver an official apology and to reassure everyone that work could commence, turning a blind eye to the building of the Expedition House, even though Lawrence had not yet received permission from Istanbul. No doubt inspired by his insouciance, Lawrence impudently wired to the capital again suggesting that it would be convenient to have permission to build the house beforeit had actually been completed.